Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997. ISBN: 0804736626. Price: $19.95.

The publication of Susan Wolfson's relatively recent book Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism is a terribly important event, not only in the history of Romantic Studies, but in the history of the theoretical discourses currently questioning whether the study of literature should become Cultural Studies, and asking to what extent the practice of aesthetic appreciation should be abandoned for political criticism. Wolfson's text is charged to the hilt with information about and readings of the interplay between semantic and formal elements in Romantic poems by Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Her detailed readings of these poems deserve the careful and sustained attention they call for. Wolfson's account of various poetic practices—about the political intentions informing Shelley's Mask of Anarchy for instance, and about the interplay of the verbal and the graphic in Blake's poetry, beginning with his early, unengraved Poetical Sketches—intervenes in ongoing and pressing critical debates within the field of Romantic poetry. Moreover, Wolfson delineates how specific poetic forms generate competing interpretations in major critical textsby Romanticists. In this review, I will focus less on that contribution than on the book's theoretical import, partly because close reading cannot be summarized, and partly because I wish to show why the theoretical import of her work must be quietly stated, for formal reasons: I will show here why Wolfson's litotes in theoretical argument is necessary, as well as what might be missed if we simply take at face value the understatement of her modest theoretical charges. Wolfson's text eschews grand theoretical claims for instances of complex close reading, confining discussions of its own place in the theoretical scene to the introduction, short conclusion, and only one or two paragraphs in each chapter. The book opens by giving us a theoretical framework that is by now very familiar to Romanticists, and so may seem a bit atavistic insofar as she counters a critical charge against Romanticism that has already in many ways been renounced by those who levied the charge in the first place. As the story goes, Marjorie Levinson and Jerome McGann attacked Romantic poets for being immersed in an aesthetic ideology that protected them (and later readers) from history, for using the theory of organic unity, in other words, to paper over ideological contradictions. Subsequent critics including Wolfson, and perhaps even McGann and Levinson themselves, have realized that the charge against poetic form for being quietist is a charge levied by Romantic poetry against itself. Part of the understatement of Wolfson's theoretical countercharge, then, comes from not being able to say to McGann, Levinson, and Terry Eagleton (who attacks the aesthetic rather than Romanticism per se), simply, "You are wrong." Rather, her close readings of Romantic poems reveal in the poems themselves the critique of aesthetic ideology in the sense of a false consciousness sustained by a false (or sheerly representational) sense of unity. Wolfson beautifully shows, for instance, that Wordsworth's scene of the drowned man, as it is moved and reworked through successive revisions of The Prelude, serves less to aestheticize death by connecting the dead body's appearance to what Wordsworth has read in books, through "purified aesthetic control," than it does "to enact a revisionary dialectic of confrontation and containment" that repeatedly gestures toward the "decay" it seeks to stave off by attempting to aesthetically displace the terror of it (pp. 124, 121). In Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, Shelley attempts to displace a "poetics of dormancy" (p. 288n.12) by a "political poetics" through deploying the formal technique of a dream vision from which the reveur never awakens in …